Ignoring race as a category is not the way forward any more than it is not to recognize racism within the LCMS. I identify with the young LCMS pastor who in his sermon acknowledged how racist thoughts creep up on him.
Marie Meyer
If ignoring race as a category is not the way forward, then I must ask what the destination is. The way toward a church and world in which nobody is judged by the color of their skin is to stop considering the color of their skin.
Ignoring the realty that humans have different skin colors, be they black, brown, yellow or white, is unrealistic. In this instance, having a white person suggest that having black skin is best no longer considered a category of being human denies that persons of black skin have for centuries been regarded as a different category of humanity. Black persons have every right to say, "Are you kidding? That's fine for you to say from your position of privilege. Get real man!"
How our country regarded men and women of color began in our country with slavery, went on to include lynching, Jim Crow laws, segregation in the military, housing, education and heath care. Remnants of how whites regarded blacks continues to exist today. Persons of black skin are excluded in not a few hidden housing patterns, schools in black communities often lack the same resources as schools on white communities. When our Asian foster son was stopped by police as he walked home from school, "What are you doing here?" When a black boy arrived early for confirmation class and was sitting on church steps waiting arrived for Pastor Meyer, a police car and stopped to ask what he was doing there.
The way forward is to recognize that persons of color are still not given the same status, opportunity, education or housing as white persons in some American communities. There are Lutheran churches in these communities. Some, but not all, have been proactive in recognizing what the CTCR calls on them and us to do and say.
For whites to deny the reality of how their status in American culture offers advantages not afforded blacks is, IMO, paternalistic, perhaps even arrogant.
Yeas ago
Christianity Today featured an article on George Washington Carver. Carver is quoted to have said that the white man has to get off the black's man's neck. Why? So that the black man can get up and help the white man see the truth of his wrongful treatment/regard for the black man. I submit that whites today need the black man to help us come to the reality of our privileged status in America. We need black Christians to being us to repentance for our sin.
The solution is not to deny the reality that humans have different colors of skin. It is for persons of white skin to recognize the truth that they are responsible for past and present cultural, institutional and personal egocentric sinful silence for how color has contributed to differences within humanity that are offend the true God as revealed in the Written and Incarnate God.
Marie Meyer